Monday, 26 September 2016

Newspapers
today are filled with stories of violence, hatred and intolerance especially
towards the female sex. Almost every other day I read news that makes me cringe
and makes me wonder how corrupted the world has become. I mean what else would
you feel when you read about an 11 month old baby being kidnapped and raped for
two hours and then left to die. Now the society will tell that it’s not his
fault. May be the guy ate too much chowmein and was forced to rape an infant! I
blame China for it, why do you have to put so much MSG in your products,
causing such hormonal imbalances! (ATTENTION
PhD SCHOLARS: There’s a research topic for your thesis. Guaranteed results,
just don’t forget to acknowledge the Khap panchayat for it). I suppose now
we should marry our daughters straight out of their mother’s womb because of
course young girls **( read infants)** are vulnerable to rapes. Or maybe she was wearing skimpy clothes. The infant
should have known better than to lie around in such a provocative way.

Other day I read about a girl who was murdered by her jilted
lover in Jaipur. I mean what right she had to break up with him. Didn’t she
know that she didn’t have any say in her life? First wrong she did was getting
in a relationship and then second she did was to dump the guy. Girls should
know their position in this society. We are just here to be used by our male
counterparts and any ambition or dream we might have for our lives must be
nipped in the bud before it gives any of us even a small hope for a better
future.

Now I believe most will understand my sarcasm in the
previous two paragraphs. Those who don’t please get yourselves tested because
you lack brains and not just basic social empathy.

You know what the problem is? The problem is how we see or
perceive women. I came across this video by Jefferson Bethke where he mentioned
this study on how people both men and women look at a woman’s body. It was
observed that basically when we look at a woman’s body we process it using “local
processing” and when we see a man’s body, we use what is called a “global
processing”. This is much like when you see a big house, under the local processing
you focus on the door or the other parts of the house while under the global processing
you view the house as a whole. So you see the problem is how we objectify women.
When God made this earth, He didn’t show any bias. He made both man and woman
in his own image. It was only when sin entered in this world through
disobedience of Adam and Eve that the perfect world created by God became the
imperfect world where we women have to fight for our rights and to get
recognition. Many people have this misconception that when God cursed Eve He
commanded Adam that he should rule over Eve, rather God was just stating that
this is what would happen because of what both of them did. Unless we start
seeing people as how God made them we can’t really respect them.

This lack of respect and objectification is seen in our
everyday behavior and not just in the lewd comments that women have to face on
the streets. It happens everywhere, in schools, colleges, workplace, churches
and even our homes. Why do we tell a girl to dress up in a full sleeve salwar
suit? Why don’t we tell our sons, our husbands to not look at women with lust,
not undress them every time one walks past them? Because believe it or not that’s
what happens most of the time. Take it from a person who has been groped in
buses and molested by a trusted man in the safety of home. Bible teaches women
to dress up modestly because God doesn’t want us to have our self-worth based
on the brand of clothes we wear or by the external adorning but He wants us to
focus on the imperishable beauty of the quiet and gentle spirit. It’s not so
that our men are not tempted! If that were the case no woman in a Burkha would
ever have been eve teased or raped.

There are so many references where men are urged to have
self-control, not to lust. Why is that so? Not because women are going on about
showing off their bodies and using them to entice the innocent men and cause
them to sin. It is because humans have become so perverted that we have stopped
looking at each other as creation of God but just as commodities which are
there to be used and thrown away. It’s the wickedness of man that is to be
blamed when a girl gets killed by her so called lover, when a child is robbed
of her innocence, when a Nirbhaya is brutally raped and murdered. No length of
the skirt can ever be impugned for a man to look at a woman with lechery.

Women are not something to be kept as a show piece in our
living rooms to enhance the beauty of the house, but they are the creation of
God without whom life in itself has no means of survival. Both man and woman
are the perfect images of God. We are not an object so stop treating us like
one.